10 Surprising Last-Minute WWE WrestleMania Card Twists

2. From Undesirable To Undeniable

WWE WrestleMania 38 Cody Rhodes Seth Rollins
WWE.com

When you talk about hiding a surprise match in plain sight, WrestleMania 38 wrote the book on it. Steve Austin/Kevin Owens wasn’t the only such rumor-turned-reality match on night one.

As a storyline, Seth Rollins spending weeks trying to find his way into Mania was stupid from the outset. It strains – and actually shatters – credulity that a multi-time world champion would have to finagle his way into a WrestleMania match, but that’s what fans were asked to believe… right up until Mr. McMahon said what we were all thinking and wondered why Rollins didn’t just ask for a match. The catch? Seth would face a surprise opponent.

By this point, everyone knew who that opponent was going to be. But that didn’t make it any less unbelievable when former AEW executive vice president Cody Rhodes returned to a WWE ring for the first time in six years. More remarkably, this was the American Nightmare. Not Dashing Cody. Not Stardust. Not one-third of Legacy. It was AEW’s version of Rhodes, robe, theme and entrance in all.

The match kicked off a tremendous trilogy between the two men that firmly established Cody as a top babyface in today’s WWE. Even a torn pec could only delay, not deny, his ascension to the top of the card, and now Rhodes is poised to main-event Mania 39.

But go back and listen to the explosion when Rhodes made his entrance. That’s a surprise everyone knew was coming, and fans still lost their minds. That’s really impossible to pull off.

Contributor
Contributor

Scott is a former journalist and longtime wrestling fan who was smart enough to abandon WCW during the Monday Night Wars the same time as the Radicalz. He fondly remembers watching WrestleMania III, IV, V and VI and Saturday Night's Main Event, came back to wrestling during the Attitude Era, and has been a consumer of sports entertainment since then. He's written for WhatCulture for more than a decade, establishing the Ups and Downs articles for WWE Raw and WWE PPVs/PLEs and composing pieces on a variety of topics.